Strawberry Muffins

Andrew came home with a pint of strawberries on Friday. A coworker of his had brought strawberries to work, claiming her father had received a surplus supply of strawberries. Whatever the story, I now had a pint of strawberries to work into a recipe.

I found a highly-rated recipe on Allrecipes.com for Strawberry Bread and decided to turn it into muffins as my oven tends to burn anything that needs to be in the oven for over 30 minutes.

Strawberry Muffins (modified for 18 servings instead of the usual 24)

2 cups fresh strawberries (I sliced them and then mashed them lightly with the whisk I used to blend the dry ingredients)
2 and 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 and 1/2 cups white sugar
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs, beaten
3/4 cup chopped pecans (toasted in the oven broiler beforehand for 4 minutes)
3 drops of red food coloring (to make it a pretty pink color!)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Line muffin tins with cupcake papers.
2. Slice strawberries, and place in medium-sized bowl. Sprinkle lightly with sugar, and set aside while preparing bread mixture.
3. Combine flour, sugar, cinnamon, salt and baking soda in large bowl: mix well.
4. Blend oil and eggs into strawberries. Add strawberry mixture to flour mixture, blending until dry ingredients are just moistened.
5. Stir in pecans.

At this point, the batter looked promising - not too thick while being full with strawberries and pecans!

Next, I spooned the batter into pans, using pink cupcake liners to match the batter. I was aiming for 2/3 full but it was hard to control the size of some of the spoonfuls. Luckily, this batter doesn't have a tendency to rise too much and none of the muffins overflowed.



Afterwards, I served the muffins with fresh strawberry butter. I was actually inspired to make the butter while watching an episode of "Throwdown with Bobby Flay" on Food Network. He challenged a woman named Melba to see who could make a better fried chicken on waffle combo (which seems to be a mismatched item menu item to me but apparently, it's a jazz-inspired meal). Melba served her waffles with homemade strawberry butter and I decided that I could make something similar.

Joyce's Strawberry Butter (I improvised and it came out great!)
1/4 cup butter (softened)
4 -5 strawberries (sliced and then mashed using a hand mixer or a food processor)
2 tablespoons of confectioner's sugar

Simply blend all the ingredients together to form enough spread for at least a dozen muffins.

Serve muffins warm from the oven with a generous amount of Strawberry Butter!


The muffins came out pretty well. There was definitely strawberry flavor but I felt like the cinnamon and the pecans were the biggest taste points of the muffin. It was the strawberry butter on top of the muffin that made this a GREAT dessert - it captured the taste of fresh, ripe strawberries and brought a nice creamy texture to each bite of muffin.

It's a dangerous combo, I've already had three today! I'm sending the rest with Andrew to work tomorrow to get them out of the house.